Friday 25 January 2008 14.00 EST
First published on Friday 25 January 2008 14.00 EST

The photograph looks like it was taken through reinforced glass (the poor quality of the picture suggests the furtive use of a mobile phone).

The brown-haired figure in the centre of the frame is sitting beneath a window with the curtains closed at the back of the room, apparently reading. On the wall by the side of the figure hang what could be a couple of Christmas cards. A smudge of colour indicates some type of decoration.

Without some explanation, the person in the picture could be anyone. The image is so vague that it is hard to tell even if the subject is male or female.

Once placed on the front page of a popular tabloid newspaper, however, as the photograph was this week, and furnished with large-font headlines, all becomes clear: it is in fact, "Rose West in her cosy cell".

And yet another Prison Service scandal guaranteed to cause outrage appears to go unchecked by the authorities.

The accompanying story adds more insult to the affronted reader. "Rose West sits in her snug cell living a life of luxury behind bars."

Further on, we are told that West "is allowed a TV, DVD and stereo and can make daily phone calls to her few family and friends".

A quote from the helpful "source" at Bronzefield prison, Middlesex, where West is serving life in prison, gives us a little more insight into the kind of existence the most infamous female life-sentence prisoner in the country is leading.

In case we were wondering how West feels about her imprisonment, the source, who no doubt is the same person who took the photograph, tells us: "She treats prison like a holiday camp," adding that prison, for West, is "like she's enjoying an all-expenses trip to Butlins". I doubt that, somehow.

But what are the prison authorities doing about this scandal? How can it be that some anonymous "source" or "insider" is allowed yet again to get away with undermining the efforts of the decent people of the Prison Service, who are trying to run a humane regime for the most wretched of society's imprisoned, by selling such trash to journalists?

How is it that non-stories about individual prisoners and prison conditions, dressed up as "scandals", are continually allowed to appear in the tabloid press? This information breaches Home Office guidelines, and possibly the Official Secrets Act, yet not a single individual responsible is ever brought to account.

The real scandal here, of course, is that our prison system has been operating on the edge of crisis for a good 10 years or more now.

More and more people are being sent to prison, and for longer. We have record numbers of women and children in prison, more mentally ill people and people with learning disabilities in prison, and more old people being sent to prison than ever before. And to what end?

Reoffending rates are as high as they have ever been, and self-inflicted deaths are on the increase. On average, almost two people a week took their own lives last year, and hundreds more who attempted suicide were resuscitated by vigilant staff.

In the same period, there were thousands of incidences of prisoner self-harm; and thousands of assaults were committed, including prisoner on prisoner, prisoner on staff and staff on prisoner.

Prison officers were so disillusioned with their working environment last year that they broke a no-strike agreement and staged a walkout.

In response to the problems, all the government has done so far is talk up the intention to provide more prison places and in the meantime let a few thousand prisoners out a week or two early, with no apparent benefit to the community and no discernible long-term benefits to the prison system.

There are a significant number of people in the UK who are committed to creating a just and humane prison system worthy of a civilised society - a system that serves us well by keeping the people we lock up safe and turning them out, when the time comes, less inclined to cause harm and distress to others. Stories such as the "Rose West living in luxury" nonsense do untold damage to the work of those who are striving on our behalf to achieve this.

By manipulating and distorting the public perception of the reality of prison life for the majority of prisoners, such stories act as a smokescreen that serves only to hide the extent of the system's failures. Perhaps the authorities are secretly gleeful when they appear.

People who expose abuse within the prison system are to be encouraged and applauded. But those within the system who act as "sources" and "insiders" providing journalists with titillating twaddle about high-profile prisoners should be sought out and made an example of.

It is to the shame of the Prison Service that there has been no announcement of a) an immediate inquiry to find out who was responsible for this latest breach of protocol and (b) an intention to discipline or prosecute whoever it was in this case and anyone else caught in the future.